Food service providers often offer their services to educational institutions or factories that have scheduled breaks for lunch, tea and/or dinner. The food service providers are responsible to supply quality meals to a large group of people, for example university students or factory workers at certain scheduled times.

The aim of this paper is to provide FingerTec resellers with ideas on how to expand the business of FingerTec from merely time attendance and access control to other areas of application and in this issue, Meal System.

The Idea

Parents can do prepayment or post payments for meals and payments will be deducted only if their children verified their fingerprint to redeem the food or parents would be invoiced at the end of the month. Employer can use the system to offer the same to employees, to provide better meal system for employees.

The Objective

For food service provider:

1.

To offer an effective system for payment and redemption of food.

2.

To get accurate assessment of the menu and food supply.

For parents:

1.

To make sure that the money given for food is spent on meals rather on other items.

2.

Parents can check on the type of food their children consume.

For students:

1.

Having meals prepaid for

2.

Easy way to redeem food.

Technology Characteristics of FingerTec Solution

1.

To integrate OFIS client into the Meal System.

The system could be proposed to schools, offices and factories. OFIS client is required to develop a plug-in application to the meal system. Every user must verify at the OFIS scanner before he/she can proceed to order his/her meal. Every verified transaction log stored into the database of the meal system, and the price of the ordered meal. Administrator generates the reports at the end of the month and sends to parents as reference.

2.

OFIS scanner as enrollment and verification station

The OFIS scanner is a USB interface fingerprint-capturing device. The application (developed by using OFIS client) shall be installed into the PC installed with Meal System, to enroll and verify users. During enrollment, a sample interface as below will appear to assist administrator in doing their job.

A user needs to place the same finger on the OFIS scanner for 4 times during enrollment. Administrator and user can check the quality of fingerprint image on the screen. Administrator must advice user to enroll with another fingerprint if the previous image is too smudged for use. The fingerprint captured will be converted into fingerprint templates (alphanumeric coding) and saved into database.

However the fingerprint templates cannot be re-converted into any fingerprint image. Therefore, users the fingerprint information is uniquely used for this purpose only.

The same workstation and OFIS scanner are used to verify user’s fingerprint. During the operation, a sample interface will appear on the screen to request user to input fingerprint.

User only places finger on the scanner to capture fingerprint. OFIS client will start to search into its database to seek for the matched image. If a matched is found, OFIS client will display a welcome message on screen, and user can continue the next operation (to order his/her meal). If verification is failed, OFIS client always requests the user to try again.

3.

The Meal System

Every user will be assigned with a unique user ID during enrollment. Administrator needs to fill in all user information into the system i.e. full name, class, parents’ name and address etc. Every time user (student) verifies successfully, he/she shall be allowed to order his/her meal. User does not need to pay the administrator because the meals can be paid using prepayment or post payment method, as preferred.

All information (user ID, date and time of verification and meal taken, price of meals) will be downloaded into the meal system database server. The server calculates total meal taken by every user and the amount to be paid into a report. The report will be sent to each parent as meal invoices.